Friday, June 25, 2021

Windows 11 Announced

Yesterday (Thursday, June 24th) Microsoft held an event revealing their up and coming Windows 11 operating system. Windows 11 is something like a facelift for Windows 10, seeing major UI redesigns that I am personally not too accepting of. The intentions behind the UI changes are primarily for touch screen devices so that is likely why it is a disappointment to me as a desktop user. There have also been major hardware linked improvements for Windows 11, primarily direct storage API which allows games to pull assets from out of an SSD straight to the graphics card, bypassing the need for it to get bottlenecked within the CPU. In layman's terms this means that video game graphics have one less step required to get outputted to the display, reducing load times tremendously. Another benefit to gamers is that Windows 11 will have auto-HDR like the new Xbox consoles have, giving older games that are not HDR capable the ability to be displayed as HDR.

A major concern coming from this announcement is the hardware requirements, you will need a DirectX 12 or later graphics card, and your firmware needs to be secure boot capable and you have to have a TPM 2.0 chip on your motherboard. Secure boot and the TPM chip could be disabled through the BIOS on you computer or your device might not be capable of these options, either way this requirement will lock lots of people out of upgrading to Windows 11.

If you want to see if you PC is capable of upgrading to Windows 11 and come into issues like the TPM chip requirement PC Gamer has an article that should help provide a solution.

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